Why we write memoirs
We write memoirs more for ourselves than others.
I learned to fly in a Hughes TH-55 like the one below. It's a little machine that in flight school, we called the Mattel Messerschmitt. Like a lot of things in life the Hughes was both simple and exotically complex. It had two seats, a six-cylinder engine, held twenty-five gallons of fuel and could fly for two hours. Simple as it looked the Hughes would kill you as soon as look at you. It was overpowered, twitchy as hell and completely unforgiving. In other words the perfect training helicopter. If you can fly the Hughes, you can fly anything. I’d never flown anything before that wasn’t made of balsa wood, and every one of those play airplanes crashed, so… But I did learn to fly the TH-55 helicopter, soloed in June 1969 and went on to fly Hueys in Vietnam. It’s all in the memoir, and it’s all in my mind from almost fifty years ago, the fragile details falling away little by little. I guess that’s why people write memoirs, more for ourselves than others, to preserve, however flimsy, those memories that erode like balsa wood as our lives teach us new and perhaps better things, as life goes from simple to exotic and we gain wisdom.
**Don't forget the .99 Cent sale Monday--TSBM E-book on Amazon/Kindle just .99 Cents for 24 hours.
I learned to fly in a Hughes TH-55 like the one below. It's a little machine that in flight school, we called the Mattel Messerschmitt. Like a lot of things in life the Hughes was both simple and exotically complex. It had two seats, a six-cylinder engine, held twenty-five gallons of fuel and could fly for two hours. Simple as it looked the Hughes would kill you as soon as look at you. It was overpowered, twitchy as hell and completely unforgiving. In other words the perfect training helicopter. If you can fly the Hughes, you can fly anything. I’d never flown anything before that wasn’t made of balsa wood, and every one of those play airplanes crashed, so… But I did learn to fly the TH-55 helicopter, soloed in June 1969 and went on to fly Hueys in Vietnam. It’s all in the memoir, and it’s all in my mind from almost fifty years ago, the fragile details falling away little by little. I guess that’s why people write memoirs, more for ourselves than others, to preserve, however flimsy, those memories that erode like balsa wood as our lives teach us new and perhaps better things, as life goes from simple to exotic and we gain wisdom.
**Don't forget the .99 Cent sale Monday--TSBM E-book on Amazon/Kindle just .99 Cents for 24 hours.
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